Regarding a method for setting associated control of home appliances, as a pattern setting method to control home appliances upon a button operation on a home appliance control apparatus as a trigger, there has been used a method for making the settings by storing contents of operations through sequential operations on plural home appliances (for example, Patent Document 1).
Also, there has been used a method for creating a control table to control home appliances by acquiring a model table from a server and developing the model table while establishing a correspondence with home appliances connected to the network (for example, Patent Document 2).
The method in the related art involving the sequential operations on home appliances, however, has problems in that it is necessary to determine in advance which appliance is to be placed under associated control and in which manner before the operations, a setting constructor has to consider associated control to enable the control that suits the life pattern of the user, and further, when he makes an error during the operations, he has to perform the operations again. Meanwhile, although the method involving the acquisition of the model table from the server is suitable to enable user-independent uniform control, it is necessary to set and manage the control data in the server in order to enable diverse control that meets the needs of individual users. This method, therefore, has a problem that it is not suitable to enable diverse control for each user.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent No. 2916020    Patent Document 2: JP-A-2003-274033